Hi Sergey, On 08/26/2011 09:37 PM, Sergey Beryozkin wrote: > On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Dennis Sosnoski <[email protected]> wrote: >> ... >> >> The principle of being strict in what you send, open in what you expect, >> is what led to the browser wars on the web. Each browser implemented its >> own way of handling things which weren't correct, so web sites might >> look good with one browser but not with another. We'd all have been much >> better off if the browser builders had all agreed to just reject >> anything which was not correct. > All browsers will ignore unrecognized HTML tags which is the > underlying idea behind the forward > compatibility. I think what you are referring to has mostly to do with > non-portable scripts being deployed > at individual sites, ex, IE and Firefox will probably show the same > dynamic content slightly differently...
Ok, it's true that Postel's principle didn't really lead to the browser wars on the web. The people who were producing content were violating the principle by being sloppy in what they produced, and the browsers had a competition to try to work with the sloppiest HTML. There was a lot of this, at least back in the '90s. People were creating HTML pages with missing required start or end tags, misspelled tags, and so on. The browsers would interpret this malformed HTML in different ways, resulting in web pages that would look fine in one browser (the one the developers of the page had tested on, of course) but not in others. - Dennis
